Time for Justice for Children in New York

Co-authored by Melanie Hartzog, Executive Director, CDF-New York
Under New York’s juvenile justice system a child as young as 7 can be arrested for a crime, and a 16-year-old is automatically charged as an adult.

These laws are shockingly behind the times — bad for children and bad for public safety. New York is one of only four states to create a juvenile jurisdiction for little children who are barely old enough to shed their baby teeth and still believe in the tooth fairy. And they are expected to have the cognitive development necessary to participate in and understand a trial?

New York is one of only two states to ignore the latest neurological research underscoring the fact that 16- and 17-year-olds are still children developmentally. Their brains will not be fully formed until age 25, and they lack the ability to control impulsive behavior by focusing on its consequences.
This key developmental period is an important opportunity for rehabilitation. Research shows that adolescents are highly receptive to change in a way that adults are not. They respond very well to proven interventions and with them can learn to make more responsible choices.

Ignoring evidence-based interventions proven to reduce recidivism and continuing to ship teens off to crime school (adult prison) are mistakes we can’t afford to keep making. In adult prisons, youths are more likely to suffer physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and be molded by other prisoners, often hardened career criminals. Studies have found that youths in the adult criminal justice system are 36 times more likely to commit suicide and are rearrested 34-percent more often for felony crimes than their peers in the juvenile justice system.

This sobering fact, that automatically charging 16- and 17-year-olds as adults makes them more likely to commit violent crimes, is proof that this policy is a threat to public safety. The evidence shows that children should be treated as children, particularly since these teen arrests are overwhelmingly for nonviolent crimes like shoplifting, turnstile jumping, or drug possession. The racial disparities in policing youths of color (over 70 percent of the children arrested and 80 percent of the children sent to prison statewide are Black and Latino) compound the harm that these unfair laws are inflicting on our children and communities.

Earlier this year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo included recommendations from his Commission on Youth, Public Safety & Justice in his 2015-16 executive budget. His proposal raises the minimum age of juvenile jurisdiction from age 7 to 12 (age 10 in rare cases of homicide). It also raises the overall age of juvenile jurisdiction to 18 and broadens the list of eligible circumstances in which young offender status can be assigned to age 21. Importantly, this means that 16- and 17-year-olds would never again be housed with adult criminals. Instead, the justice system would focus on proven services and interventions that the most current research has demonstrated result in better outcomes for youths and reduce recidivism and keep communities safer from violent crime.

CDF’s work to raise the age in New York builds on our early work to keep children out of adult jails — recognizing inhumane conditions and great harms to children. In the foreword to our 1976 report "Children in Adult Jails," Judge Justine Wise Polier, the state of New York’s first woman judge, who presided in New York City’s family court for 38 years and at the time was the director of CDF’s Juvenile Justice Division, chided states that continued to prosecute and jail children in the adult criminal justice system: “It has been over three-quarters of a century since states began to legislate that children should be treated as children.”
Today New York and North Carolina are the only two states left that automatically treat children as adult criminals, but how pleased Judge Polier would be that Gov. Cuomo has put forward a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to juvenile justice reform that would change that. Now is the time for the New York state legislature to join him by adopting this important, long-overdue change. Then North Carolina, as the last outlier, should join the rest of the states in seeking justice for children.

Don't Leave Children Short

Congress is about to strike a deal that takes care of seniors and doctors but leaves low-income and “at-risk” children short. Congress’ annual struggle to avoid cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians will continue to give seniors the care they need is widely considered must-pass bipartisan legislation. Known as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) or “doc fix,” this annual process often provides a vehicle for moving other legislative health priorities. (Last year it included one year of funding for the important Maternal and Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting program.) While Congress has long discussed passing a permanent “doc fix,” leaders in the House of Representatives have now released an outline for doing it and plan to act on it next week. They hope the Senate will follow and act before the current “doc fix” expires March 31.
This is great news for seniors whom we support, but why is Congress leaving children behind by extending funding for the successful bipartisan Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the Maternal and Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program for only two years? The cost of the “doc fix” is about $140 billion, while a two-year extension of CHIP and home visiting funding is less than $6 billion. Yet in the House proposal this increase required an “offset,” meaning it had to be paid for, while the “doc fix” that is more than 20 times more expensive does not. This is profoundly unjust to children whose lives are equally important.

A clean four-year CHIP funding extension and four years of funding for home visiting must be included in any final “doc fix” package. Certainly the price tag is not the obstacle. Funding for CHIP and home visiting for four years is expected to add up to less than $12 billion to serve millions of vulnerable children, a critical investment in the health of lower-income children.

Today, more than 8 million children depend on CHIP for health coverage. Together with Medicaid, CHIP has played a vital role in bringing the number of uninsured children to the lowest level on record. Simply put, CHIP is a bipartisan success story. But if funding is not extended quickly, up to 2 million children could become uninsured, and millions more would have to pay significantly more for less-comprehensive coverage. This would reverse the progress made over the past two decades and create a health coverage gap among children in working families. The vast majority of governors, both Democrats and Republicans, share our concerns about CHIP funds expiring abruptly. They are concerned about higher costs and inadequate benefits for children, budget challenges to cover children without CHIP, and an increase in uninsured children if CHIP funding ends.

The Children’s Defense Fund strongly supports a clean four-year extension of CHIP through 2019 because:

• The new health insurance exchanges need at least four years to make changes to ensure children have comparable pediatric benefits with costs to families no higher than in CHIP today. It is highly unlikely these improvements will be enacted and implemented by 2017.
• CHIP coverage saves money for states and the federal government. It is more efficient than private health insurance, costs less than subsidized exchange coverage and provides the comprehensive coverage that gives children and families access to the pediatricians, specialists and special facilities children need.

Four years of funding for the Maternal and Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting program is also a bargain. It brings quality home visiting to children and parents in every state and the District of Columbia and has bipartisan roots. Quality voluntary home visiting programs implement a two-generation strategy in which preschool children under age 5 and their parents benefit by being connected to community resources. MIECHV will end March 31 if funding is not extended. A four-year extension will allow states to expand their programs and reach many more children.

Rigorous research studies have found that quality, evidence-based home visiting programs produce measurable, long-term outcomes for children and families, including better health; greater school readiness, academic achievement, parental involvement, and economic self-sufficiency; and reduced child maltreatment, abuse, and juvenile delinquency.

Almost 80 percent of families participating in the MIECHV program had household incomes at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty line. As in CHIP, where states have flexibility to craft their programs, states that receive MIECHV funding can tailor their programs to serve the specific needs of their communities but have to meet certain benchmarks. Four more years of funding will enable important progress in meeting those benchmarks.

Congress must stop playing politics with children and pass four more years of funding for CHIP and MIECHV as part of the “doc fix” package if millions of children are not to be left with uncertainty and at greater risk. We need to ensure our children are healthy, supported, and strong if they are going to be able to support our growing number of seniors in the future. Congress must commit to this small but extremely important investment. About 30 years ago, CDF, AARP, the National Council on Aging, and the Child Welfare League of America established Generations United, an energetic organization today committed to improving the lives of children, youths, and older adults through intergenerational collaboration, public policies and programs for the enduring benefit of all. Its motto is “Stronger Together.” Four years of funding for both CHIP and MIECHV will help strengthen our children and help them support our older and aging generations.

Staying on the March

Fifty years ago I traveled from Mississippi to Selma, Alabama on March 21^st, 1965 to join Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of fellow citizens marching the 54 miles to the steps of the state’s capitol in Montgomery. Millions of Americans now know about this march thanks to the movie Selma and the recent 50^th anniversary celebration. Selma was the site of a courageous voting rights campaign by Black citizens which was met by brutal Southern Jim Crow law enforcement and citizen violence. The nation was shocked two weeks earlier when John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams set out on a nonviolent march with a group of 600 people toward Montgomery to demand their right to vote and were brutally attacked by lawless state and local law enforcement officials at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The televised images of “Bloody Sunday” and the savage beatings of the marchers—including Congressman Lewis whose skull was fractured—were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement and in America’s struggle to become America. It provoked the thousands of us (ultimately about 25,000) who came together later to finish the march, safer thanks to Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.’s order that we had a right to peaceful protest and with National Guard protection. And we were buoyed by President Johnson’s March 15^th, 1965 address calling on Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In that speech—“The American Promise”—President Johnson said: “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal’—‘government by consent of the governed’—‘give me liberty or give me death’... Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man... To apply any other test—to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth—is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”  President Johnson also said: “Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.”

Fifty years later, speaking at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Obama echoed the same themes: “[Selma is] the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents... These are not just words. They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny.” He added: “The American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge, that’s the same instinct that moved patriots to choose revolution over tyranny. It’s the same instinct that drew immigrants from across oceans and the Rio Grande; the same instinct that led women to reach for the ballot, workers to organize against an unjust status quo; the same instinct that led us to plant a flag at Iwo Jima and on the surface of the Moon. It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America. That’s what makes us unique.”

The first Selma march was planned not only to gain the right to vote but to protest the tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black church deacon and military veteran killed in Marion, Alabama when he, his mother, sister, and 82-year-old grandfather attended another nonviolent voting rights demonstration where marchers were brutally attacked by racist Alabama law enforcement officials who broke it up. Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and beaten trying to shield his mother from a police nightstick. What a terrible irony that in this year of celebration of the Selma marches we are witnessing the resurgence of overt law enforcement brutality and injustice in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York City, and elsewhere, reminding us how far we still have to go. The continuing protests against unequal justice under the law by those enjoined to protect all of us and all of our children after the deaths of teenager Michael Brown, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, and others are a wake-up call about the deeply embedded systemic racism still alive in America. Each of us has a responsibility to root it out and stop it in its tracks.

Each American must remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society. Each of us has a personal responsibility to be decent and fair and insist that others be so in our presence. Don’t tell, laugh at, or tolerate racial, ethnic, religious, or gender jokes—or any practices intended to demean rather than enhance another human being. Walk away from them. Stare them down. Make them unacceptable in our presence and in our institutions. Through daily moral consciousness each of us has a responsibility to counter the proliferating voices of racial and moral and ethnic and religious division that are regaining respectability over our land. Let’s face up to rather than ignore our growing racial problems which are America’s historical and future Achilles’ heel unless addressed firmly and courageously.

As Dr. King spoke to us at the end of the exhilarating Selma to Montgomery March he reminded us that we weren’t done: “Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past... Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat... Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congressmen who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”

And let us all stand up right now to all those in our Congress, statehouses, and across our country who are trying to take away and suppress the right to vote and who are refusing to honor the sacrifice of all those who died to gain this fundamental American right. Shame on them and shame on us if we don’t act to insist that Congress renew the Voting Rights Act without a minute’s more delay. And shame on us if we do not stand up to all those who seek to turn the clock of racial progress backwards by denying equal justice under the law for all. We still have so far to go in our march to make America America—but we must march forward and never backwards.

Who Are We? What Do We Americans Truly Value?

Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now is over $800 billion dollars a year... if we judge the United States of America by that... Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. --Senator Robert F. Kennedy

What do we stand for as a nation and who do we wish to be? In a 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, Senator Robert Kennedy correctly worried too many used our nation’s wealth as the standard of greatness rather than the human values that should matter most. Our Gross Domestic Product — now $17.7 trillion — includes many things for us not to be proud of. So we should ask ourselves how well America is doing on the things that should matter most—the well-being of our children and families and the quality of justice and life in our communities and nation?

Among high-income countries the United States ranks first in Gross Domestic Product and first in the number of billionaires, and second worst in child poverty rates – ahead only of Romania whose economy is 99 percent smaller than ours. It is a national disgrace that children are the poorest group of Americans with 14.7 million living in poverty.

We are first in military spending — $11.1 billion a week — and first in military weapons exports.

We are first in the number of people incarcerated and worst in protecting our children against gun violence. A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. Children and teens in America were 17 times more likely to be killed by gun violence than those in 25 other high-income countries combined.

We are 30^th in preschool enrollment rates and 17^th in reading, 23^rd in science, and 31^st in math scores for our 15-year-olds. Nearly 60 percent of all fourth and eighth grade public school students in the U.S. and more than 80 percent of Black and almost 75 percent of Latino children in those same grades could not read or compute at grade level in 2013.

We rank first in health expenditures but 25^th in low birth weight rates, 26^th in child immunization rates, 31^st in infant mortality rates, and second worst in teenage births – just ahead of Bulgaria.

If we compare Black child well-being in America to child well-being in other nations, the U.S. Black infant mortality rate exceeds that in 65 nations including Cuba, Malaysia, and Ukraine. Our incidence of low-birth weight Black infants is higher than in 127 other nations including Cambodia, the Congo, and Guatemala.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child spells out the basic rights children should have everywhere and is the most widely and rapidly ratified international human rights treaty in history. For years the United States and Somalia, which had no recognized government, were the only United Nations members that had failed to ratify the convention. In January 2015 Somalia became the 195^th nation to do so. The United States now stands only with new U.N. member state South Sudan as the two countries that have not ratified it — and South Sudan has started working towards ratification.

The United States stands alone, despite recent progress, in still permitting life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders who were under 18 at the time of the offense. The U.S. Supreme Court has banned capital punishment for crimes committed by juveniles but America remains one of 58 nations that continues to use capital punishment for adults. In 2013 the U.S. had the sixth highest number of executions — after China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea.

If America wants to be a truly great nation on the world stage, it’s time to redefine the measures of our success. The litmus test I propose is that of the great German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for opposing Hitler’s holocaust, who said “the test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” The great South African president Nelson Mandela agreed with him and believed “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” On the Bonhoeffer-Mandela measure of success, we must do much, much better.

'Make Me a Woman'

One of my sheroes is Sojourner Truth. A brilliant but illiterate woman, she was a great orator and powerful presence who possessed great courage and determination. I often wear a pendant with her image and words: “If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” An unwavering defender of women’s rights and an abolitionist, Sojourner continues to fuel my determination to fight for equality for women, people of color, and children left behind. She was born into and lived nearly three decades in slavery but dedicated her life to combating slavery and gender inequality and second-class citizenship. She never gave up talking about or fighting for justice and equality.
Sarye Huggins is a high school senior who knows her Black history and has also been inspired by Sojourner Truth. Read a few lines from her spoken word poem “Make Me a Woman”:

Make me a woman in this world of poverty and deceit. They'll know I’m a woman by the sounds of determination coming from my feet. ... Just make me a woman.  Don’t you think the time has come? I can hear my ancestors summoning me by the sounds of their drums. A woman, me? Imagine that. Once you grant me this wish, I’m never turning back.

She also writes that she knows “strong women run through my blood”—but her journey towards becoming a strong, confident young woman has not been easy.
Sarye lives in Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, a community disproportionately plagued by poverty and violence. Her teacher explains, “She’s survived ‘Bed-Stuy, do or die’—that’s the motto of our neighborhood.” Sarye’s mother, a teacher, died from a brain tumor when Sarye was 2. Her father was frequently part of her early life, and she was raised by a beloved aunt. As a smart, shy girl attending some of the poorest and roughest schools in New York City, Sarye didn’t always feel she fit in. Although she won awards in elementary school for being an outstanding student, she also endured a lot of teasing and bullying from her peers and harbored much of the pain inside. In middle school things got worse when her father stopped calling and visiting. For the first time her grades started slipping, causing her to lose her confidence, and she began trying desperately to change herself to gain acceptance by her peers. When the inner turmoil reached a breaking point, she started cutting herself and described some of the pain she was feeling in another poem:

I didn’t want to be smart anymore. I was no longer myself. I got angry, and placing blades to my skin just did not help. I knew that what I was doing to myself wasn’t a felony, nor was it a crime, but at the same time I didn't realize that I was just destroying my heart, my soul, my body, and my beautiful mind.

The odds were stacked against Sarye, as they are against so many of our Black girls and boys today. Black children are the poorest children in America; every other Black baby is poor, and every two minutes a Black baby is born into poverty in our wealthy nation. Black children are less likely to live in two-parent families, are more likely to be abused or neglected or enter foster care, and suffer worse health outcomes than white children. Black students fall behind in school early and do not catch up; more than 80 percent of fourth- and eighth-grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level, and a Black high school student drops out every 33 seconds during the school year. Black children and youths are at greatest risk of being funneled into the prison pipeline and are at highest risk of gun violence, the leading cause of death among Black children and teens ages 1 to 19. For many of the children in Sarye’s neighborhood, these odds have already proven too much.
Sarye was blessed by her aunt’s unfailing support, and by caring teachers who began nurturing her potential during her freshman year of high school . She says, “They just saw something in me that I didn’t even really see in myself at the moment, and I think that’s what I really needed.” After Sarye attended the Summer Bridge Program at Boys & Girls High School, her English teacher recommended she apply for the Smart Scholars Program, which would allow her to take classes at Long Island University beginning in 10th grade. She surprised herself by testing into college-level English during the entrance exam. Though still in high school, she’s maintained a 4.0 in her college classes while excelling in her high school courses. Unsurprisingly, English has remained one of her strengths—and she’s embraced writing as a way of expressing some of the feelings she struggled to hide inside. From her poem “I’m Free From It”:

I didn't have to hide behind the bars of shame, hurt, or declaration. I could build on the things that were given to me and renovate the parts that were taken. My dreams that were deferred had me shaken up, but only to produce a better me in the making. ... I can look in the mirror and smile, embracing all my scars, marks, and imperfections, perfectly imperfect, not stressing to make the perfect impression, not ashamed, scared, nor confused because I am who I am for a reason.

Sarye is one of five extraordinary high school students the Children’s Defense Fund-New York will honor next week for beating the odds. A scholarship will help ease their way on the path to college. She knows she’s already made great strides and says, “I feel like allowing people to actually help me and to influence me to do better is what saved me.” What a privilege it is to help young people like Sarye become the strong Black women and men they want to be. All of us must change the odds and help all of our Black girls—and boys, and all children—become the strong and contributing adults they want to be and we need them to be as we look at the security of future generations and our nation.

No ESEA Bill Is Better Than One That Fails to Protect the Poorest Children

For fifty years Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) has been the primary source of federal funding targeted to schools to serve poor children. Its purpose has been to raise achievement for poor children through extra support to their schools to help meet their greater educational needs. Sadly, from the beginning states didn’t keep their end of the bargain. 

In 1969, the Washington Research Project (the Children’s Defense Fund’s parent organization) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. partnered with others and examined federal audit reports on how Title I funds were being used and talked to numerous federal, state, and local officials and community leaders and parents about how those critical funds were being spent. Our report, Title I: Is It Helping Poor Children?, found the answer to our question was a resounding “No.” Rather than serving the special needs of poor and disadvantaged children, many of the millions of dollars Congress appropriated had been wasted, diverted, or otherwise misused by state and local education agencies. Title I funding was often being used as general aid and to supplant -- rather than supplement -- state and local education funds, including for construction and equipment unrelated to Title I goals. For example, Fayette County, Tennessee used 90 percent of its Title I funds for construction of a predominantly Black school despite a recent federal court order that the school system desegregate, and Memphis, Tennessee used Title I funds to purchase 18 portable swimming pools in the summer of 1966. 

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) subsequently conducted several other major studies that reinforced the importance of federal accountability for money targeted to help children most in need, especially poor children and children of color. In CDF’s first report, Children Out of School in America (1974), after knocking on thousands of doors in census tracts across the nation and interviewing many state and local school officials, we found that if a child was not White, or was White but not middle class, did not speak English, was poor, needed special help with seeing, hearing, walking, reading, learning, adjusting, or growing up, was pregnant at age 15, was not smart enough, or was too smart, then in too many places school officials decided school was not the place for that child. 

We should learn from and correct our mistakes and stop repeating them over and over again for our children’s sake. It is crucial that a strong Title I program reach the children in areas of concentrated poverty if and when ESEA is reauthorized. Unfortunately the House Education and Workforce Committee, charged to lead in moving an ESEA reauthorization bill in the House of Representatives, just approved a bill (H.R. 5) in a party line vote that fails to target the needs of the poorest children by adding a “portability” provision assuring these children less help. AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and many others join us in opposing the portability provision.

The portability provision in H.R. 5 would move us backwards by distributing the same amount for a poor child regardless of the wealth of the district or school she attends. This will unravel the intent of Title I by taking resources away from children in areas of concentrated poverty and offering extra resources to schools and districts with a few poor children who may not need them. The poorest students in schools with the highest concentrations of poor children need extra help to combat poverty’s barriers. Compounding this huge backwards step, H.R. 5 also removes strong accountability provisions required to make sure the children who need help most will actually be helped. 

It is morally indefensible and extraordinarily expensive that we have 14.7 million poor children in our country -- 6.5 million of them living at less than half the poverty level. All of these poor children exceed the combined residents in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia. That more than 80 percent of Black and almost 75 percent or more of Latino public school students are unable to read and compute at grade level in 4^th and 8^th grades and, if they reach 9^th grade, 3 in 10 do not graduate within four years is a cause for extreme alarm and focused attention. Without targeted federal funding with accountability, the poorest children will lose out.

Poor children are not the only ones at educational risk. Special measures are needed to protect English language learners, children and youths with disabilities, children of color, and children and youths who are homeless or in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems. States and school districts must target resources to address achievement gaps for these vulnerable groups of children. The federal government must hold states accountable for making sure they make progress towards grade level achievement targets, high school graduation, and college and career preparation. 

The mistakes of the past should not be repeated and children and our nation need us to move forward, not backwards. No ESEA bill is better than a bill that has poor children subsidize the education of wealthier children. It is way past time for us to level the educational learning field for all children, especially those left behind.

Girls in Justice

I’m grateful for a powerful new book, Girls in Justice by artist Richard Ross, a follow-up to his moving earlier Juvenile in Justice, which combines Ross’ photographs of girls in the juvenile justice system with interviews he gathered from over 250 detention facilities across the United States. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the deeply disturbing photographs speak volumes. Ross uses the power of photography to make visible the hidden and harsh world of girls in detention. These heartwrenching images coupled with the girls’ ages and life stories should move us to confront the cruel and unjust juvenile justice system in our nation. These girls are ours: our neighbors, our children’s classmates, our daughters and granddaughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces — and, for some young children, our mothers. Girls in Justice invites the question:Why are so many girls, especially girls of color, confined in our nation’s detention facilities, and what are we as a society going to do about it? 

We must all work tirelessly to give hope and a fair chance to these girls and all children by promoting policies, programs, and supports that help them and their families, especially those most at risk. We must combat systemic problems that contribute to family and community dysfunction and wreak havoc on developing children, including girls; we must dig beneath the surface and examine the root cause of girls’ “offenses” and why injustice saps the hopes of so many young lives on our watch. 

In 2013, one in five girls in the United States was poor, and girls of color were disproportionately poor. From birth to young adulthood, children — especially poor children and children of color — encounter multiple and cumulative risk factors that often result in their being funneled into the prison pipeline through the juvenile and criminal justice systems and locked up behind bars. Such massive incarceration is sentencing millions of children to social and economic death. The pipeline to prison is lodged at the intersection of poverty and race and is intolerable in a professed society of opportunity. In 2007, the Children’s Defense Fund launched the Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crusade to confront youth incarceration and the factors driving it and propose solutions to replace it with a pipeline to college and career. While twice as many boys as girls are arrested, girls are the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile justice system. As girls rock the cradle, they rock the future, and we must pay attention to both girls and boys to ensure the development of healthy families.

Girls of color and poor girls face special challenges before they enter the juvenile justice system, during their confinement, and when they return to their communities after release. At the front end, racial disparities and the lack of appropriate treatment and support that run through every major child-serving system negatively impact their life chances by pushing more children into juvenile detention and adult prison. These include limited health and mental health care; lack of quality early childhood support experiences (including home visiting, Early Head Start and Head Start, child care, preschool, and kindergarten); children languishing in foster care waiting for permanent families and shunted through multiple placements; and failing schools with harsh zero-tolerance discipline policies, mostly for nonviolent offenses, that suspend, expel, and discourage children who then too often drop out and do not graduate. Too little effort is made to divert girls from the juvenile justice system despite the existence of successful evidence-based programs.

Girls in the system often encounter a unique set of challenges. Almost three quarters of them have been sexually or physically abused. Most are arrested for nonviolent offenses such as truancy, running away, or alcohol and substance use which can often be linked to severe abuse or neglect. These nonviolent offenses, or status offenses, would not be considered offenses for an adult. Poverty has an impact: although the trauma of sexual violence and abuse affects many girls, poor girls often lack adequate supports to keep them from juvenile detention.

Victimized girls often face more trauma and stigmatization by being held in juvenile detention facilities instead of diverted to appropriate community-based alternatives. Whether confinement is temporary or longer term, programs and personnel are often not equipped to deal with their unique needs and sometimes exacerbate the trauma. Reports are rampant of confined girls being emotionally, physically, and sexually abused, isolated, separated from their babies, unable to visit their family members regularly, and humiliated through common practices like pat downs. Detention centers need more comprehensive, gender-responsive, trauma-informed, culturally relevant services for girls. 

After release, girls, many of whom may already have been disconnected from their families and communities, need help through education, employment, and family and community support including programs to strengthen their families and assure them access to health and mental health services. Effective reentry plans should include school reenrollment, housing, job training, case management, and mentoring. All help reduce recidivism. We should all feel ashamed as the girls in this book talk about reentering detention multiple times and how these are generational patterns. This revolving door of individual and family confinement must end — now.

It is way past time for every adult to take responsibility for reducing the number of girls and boys behind bars through prevention and diversion programs and community supports both before and after detention. And it is way past time for adults of every race and income group to break our silence about the pervasive breakdown of moral, family, community and national values, to place our children first in our lives, to rebuild family and community, to model the behavior we want our children to learn, and to never give up on any child. We do not have a “child and youth problem” in America, but we have a profound adult problem. It is time for adults to address it and to give all of our children true justice: hope, opportunity, and love.